Kwagunt

About 850 years ago Mrs. Sequaptewa lived with her extended family on a bluff near Kwagunt creek. On a crisp March morning she woke up feeling somewhat out of sorts. Not that some major annoyance was looming, mind you, but a lot of little ones were getting increasingly tiresome. Chief among these was the endless chore of fetching water from the creek, a task she performed several times each day with the help of her two daughters. Men, of course, did not do things such as fetching water. Well, the time had come to do something about the water business, she thought, and that involved Mr. Sequaptewa.
At that moment, Mr. Sequaptewa—Bud—was sunning himself by the front door, belching and scratching contentedly as was his morning custom. “Bud,” said Mrs. S., “I need to talk to you.” “Dammit, woman, can’t you see I’m busy?” “I can see you are busy, all right, but you might want to listen to what I have to say anyway. Remember the ditch you promised to build three years ago, but haven’t yet? Well, you just might consider starting on it darn soon. Until that ditch is done, don’t even think of making whoopee around here, or anything else along those lines.” She then turned on her heel and went back into the house with that fierce dignity that only wives can summon because they have practiced it so much.
Bud’s synapses were of the slow-firing kind, so it took a while for the meaning of all this to sink in. As it did, the scratching slowed down, then stopped, like a toy engine running out of steam. “Jeez,” he said, “jeez.” And that is all he could say for quite a while. Eventually, he regained his customary eloquence, which at this moment consisted chiefly of expletives. “What the **** does that **** woman think she is? I’ll **** show her, that’s what I’ll do.” This was followed by several minutes worth of equally eloquent exposition. At some point, however, the realization wormed itself into his skull that perhaps there is valor in prudence, that it might be better to live to fight another day, things like that, and presently he got up with much groaning and disconsolate scratching, shouldered his digging stick, and set off in the direction of the creek. He returned quite late in the afternoon, a process repeated for several days. In the end he had constructed a ditch several hundred feet long, stone-supported where needed, dug where not, and with just the right gradient to bring water from the creek to near the dwellings where the family lived.
Connubial harmony, maybe even bliss, was now restored, but it was not to last long. Bud did not know this, basking as he was in the glory of an achievement that he figured should provide him with amenities for quite a while to come. The problem was that Mrs. S possessed a restless and inquisitive mind, and was far smarter anyway than the rest of the family, most certainly Bud, whose world was one of simple needs and simple pleasures.
“Bud.” “Whaa?” “Remember that marvelous ditch you have constructed so well with such wonderfully cunning craftsmanship?” Bud was ready to bask in this unexpected accolade when a little voice told him—caution my boy, there may be some curved thorn in that rose, which smells rather fishy anyway, if you ask me. So he said, in a studiously flat voice: “What about it?” “Well, we need to make a few additions to it, don’t we?” At this point Bud started getting mighty upset because things were not going at all well. “Woman, have you completely lost your mind? First you cause me no end of trouble by wanting this silly ditch, which is completely unnecessary because you and the girls have always brought water just fine. And now you want me to waste even more time on the damn thing?” He could only use a generic defense because he had no idea of what nasty thing was lurking in her mind this time. “I want you to build a whole bunch of little walls below the ditch over there on that nose. The walls need to be three to four hands high, at any rate high enough to make a flat terrace on the uphill side after you have filled that part with dirt. We need nine or ten lines of terraces below the ditch, and the dirt should be good stuff, the kind you can find around here if you look and are careful. Oh, by the way, the whoopee ordinance is again in effect, for you and your buddies around here, so you might as well be good boys and get to work right away—dragging things out won’t make you feel any better.”
“For Cocopalli’s sake, is there no end to this?

What will she think of next? Beans, maybe broccoli? A hot tub? Is a man to have no peace at all?” All this agitation was partly bluff because in fact Bud’s dim innards had started glowing with a degree of pride in his accomplishment. But appearances had to be maintained. When he was by himself, however, he could take the luxury of admitting that he had even begun, in a tentative sort of way, to take an interest in the project and do some thinking about it. “Yeah, having water right next to the house would be a good thing, and even the kitchen garden isn’t so bad. Maybe I can sneak in a tobacco plant or two when she isn’t looking…Maybe a little pool for washing…”
He set to work early next morning, collecting many of the slabby rocks abundant near the house and using them to make small retaining walls below the ditch. He then started to fill the spaces between the walls and the hillside with good earth from a place he knew along Kwagunt creek. He used a basket to carry the dirt, but soon realized this was no small job, so pried his two teen-age sons and a cousin from their general slouching about, paying no attention to their anguished protests. Together, they filled the terraces with soil in a few hours.
The time had now come to arrange little channels so some water would flow out of the ditch into each terrace, leaving enough water in the ditch for other terraces downstream. “Now, this is fun,” thought the four guys, in accordance with the innate tendency of males to like playing with water and mud. So they set to with enthusiasm, and produced a cunning arrangement of water flowing down from one terrace to another that even Mrs. Sequaptewa considered very cool, to her considerable surprise. “I did not know these guys had it in them,” she thought. Her mood softened, connubial amenities were restored, and Bud returned to his normal activities—for a while.
Mrs. Sequaptewa now corralled her daughters, and together they planted seeds of beans and squash in the terraces, each placed at just the right depth in a little hole made with a stick. Bud did manage to plant a few tobacco seeds at nightfall, when his wife was otherwise engaged.
It was not long before the abundant moisture and the warm spring sun combined to re-enact the ancient miracle and bring forth from the ground little plants that quickly grew and produced abundant crops, of which the deer ate only a few because of Mrs. Sequaptewa’s alert vigilance. Such unheard-of abundance right next to the house, combined with a supply of domestic water at the doorstep greatly increased the value of the property. This created much envy among the neighbors, who started coming often under some pretext or other to see for themselves how it had all been done. Some could not copy it because their house was not properly situated with respect to a creek, but those more fortunate wasted no time, and the practice soon spread up and down the farm country of the Grand Canyon, where it was used until circumstances darkened and The People left.
Over the centuries, the Sequaptewa kitchen garden fell into ruin. The plants disappeared, the ditch filled in, native vegetation re-established itself, and the walls crumbled so that only a few were left standing. But the story was not entirely lost because a geologist came upon the house, upon the ditch and its terraces many hundreds of years later, and heard, in the great silence of the Canyon, the faint voice of Mrs. Sequaptewa rousing her husband to work, his grumpy complaints, and the silvery tinkling of water cascading from one terrace to the next in a far-off spring afternoon.

Ivo Lucchitta